An honest accounting of
American history from the Cold War has not been an issue in Campaign
2000. But recent disclosures of human rights abuses and other crimes –
especially from the bloody front lines of Guatemala, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Chile and Argentina – could slow to a trickle or be stopped
outright with a victory by Texas Gov. George W. Bush and his running
mate, Dick Cheney.

For one, the Bush
family’s legacy could suffer greatly from anything approaching full
disclosure of this Cold War history.

Indeed, if the American
people understood the already documented role of the Republican
candidate’s father in a wide range of scandals, it is hard to believe
that the younger George Bush could have ridden his father’s “good
name” to the GOP nomination, let alone to the gates of the White
House.

But much of that
history remains in the shadows, ironically because Democrats chose to
limit critical investigations in the name of bipartisanship in the late
1980s and early 1990s.

More recently, national
security agencies have frustrated timely release of information,
seemingly with an eye toward the election and possible restoration of
the Bush dynasty. The Cold War history now in the balance includes
evidence implicating the elder George Bush – at least for negligence
and possibly worse – in the double homicide of Chilean dissident
Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt in a 1976
car-bombing in Washington, D.C.

This murder is under
renewed criminal investigation by the Justice Department, a probe that
would face serious new obstacles in a second Bush administration.

The American people
would have known more about the elder Bush’s role in this terrorist
incident by now, except that the CIA dragged its heels long enough to
push back release of CIA documents to Nov. 13, a week after the
election. [Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2000]

What’s already known
about the Letelier-Moffitt murders isn't pretty. In 1976, George H.W.
Bush was CIA director when his office at Langley, Va., received a
warning from a U.S. ambassador about a suspicious mission being carried
out in the United States by Chilean intelligence then headed by a paid
CIA asset, Col. Manuel Contreras.

But Bush’s agency
took no known action to stop the assassination. After the fatal
car-bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, Bush’s CIA consulted with Contreras and
planted false stories in the U.S. news media to divert suspicion away
from the killers. The CIA also withheld important evidence from the FBI.
[For details, see George H.W. Bush & a Case
State Terrorism, Sept. 23, 2000.]

After Jimmy Carter
became president in 1977 and Bush left the CIA, he remained a favorite
of disgruntled CIA personnel. By the late 1970s, these CIA men were
objecting to Carter’s human rights policies and infuriated over
restrictions on CIA activities, including the downsizing of the CIA’s
Operations Directorate. One prominent Bush backer was the legendary CIA
officer Theodore Shackley, known as the Blond Ghost.

In early 1980, top CIA
officials working on the seventh floor of headquarters were in near
rebellion against the sitting president. Some brazenly demonstrated
their hope that Bush would challenge and unseat Carter. “The seventh
floor of Langley was plastered with ‘Bush for President’ signs,”
recalled George Carver, a senior CIA analyst.

When Bush was tapped to
be Ronald Reagan’s vice presidential nominee in summer 1980, many of
these former CIA officers joined the Republican national campaign. A
contingent manned a 24-hours-a-day Operations Center at Reagan-Bush
campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va.

The ex-CIA officers
also maintained close ties to on-duty CIA officials, including Donald
Gregg and Robert Gates who worked inside Carter’s White House and were
privy to the administration’s most sensitive secrets and strategies.

Carter’s most
pressing crisis at the time was Iran, where Islamic extremists had
overrun the U.S. embassy and were holding 52 Americans hostage.

As the 1980 campaign
progressed, some former CIA men began promoting the idea of secret
Republican initiatives in Iran. Other CIA men allegedly went further,
assisting the Reagan-Bush campaign in developing back-channel contacts
with the Iranian government.

The Allegations

Over the past two
decades, more than a score of witnesses – including senior Iranian
officials, top French intelligence officers, Israeli intelligence
operatives and even Palestine leader Yasir Arafat – have confirmed the
existence of a Republican initiative to interfere with Carter’s
efforts to free the hostages before the U.S. presidential election in
1980.

In 1996, during a
meeting in Gaza, Arafat personally told former President Carter that
senior Republican emissaries approached the Palestine Liberation
Organization in 1980 with a request that Arafat help broker a delay in
the hostage release.

“You should know that
in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could
arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the elections,”
Arafat told Carter. [For details, see Diplomatic History, Fall
1996]

Arafat’s spokesman
Bassam Abu Sharif has said the GOP gambit pursued other channels, too.
In an interview with me in Tunis in 1990, Bassam indicated that Arafat
learned upon reaching Iran in 1980 that the Republicans and the Iranians
had made other arrangements.

“The offer [to
Arafat] was, ‘if you block the release of hostages, then the White
House would be open for the PLO’,” Bassam said. “I guess the same
offer was given to others, and I believe that some accepted to do it and
managed to block the release of hostages.” [For details, see Robert
Parry's Trick or Treason.]

In a little-noticed
letter to the U.S. Congress, dated Dec. 17, 1992, former Iranian
President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr said he first learned of the Republican
hostage initiative in July 1980 when a nephew of Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini returned from a meeting with an Iranian banker, Cyrus Hashemi,
who had close ties to Reagan’s campaign chief William Casey and to
Casey’s business associate, John Shaheen.

Bani-Sadr said the
message from the Khomeini emissary was clear: the Republicans were in
league with the CIA in an effort to undermine Carter and were demanding
Iran’s help.

Bani-Sadr said the
emissary “told me that if I do not accept this proposal they [the
Republicans] would make the same offer to my rivals.” The emissary
added that the Republicans “have enormous influence in the CIA,”
Bani-Sadr wrote. “Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would
result in my elimination.”

Bani-Sadr said he
resisted the GOP scheme, but the plan was accepted by the hard-line
Khomeini faction.

For years, at the
center of these so-called October Surprise allegations were the gray
eminences of the elder George Bush and Bill Casey, who allegedly
traveled to Europe for final rounds of meetings with Iranians from the
Khomeini faction.

Two eyewitnesses – an
Israeli intelligence official named Ari Ben-Menashe and a pilot named
Heinrich Rupp – placed Bush in Paris for a meeting on Oct. 19, 1980.

Bush has denied making
such a trip but has never explained what he was doing that day. His
alibi, based on partially censored Secret Service records, has not been
credibly supported by a single witness who could recall Bush’s
movements during the hours that a trip to Paris would have required.

On the other hand, in
support of the statements by Ben-Menashe and Rupp, two other witnesses
confirmed that Republicans were talking about Bush traveling to Paris at
precisely the same time frame.

These corroborating
witnesses were then-U.S. State Department official David Henderson and Chicago
Tribune journalist John Maclean. The pair met in Washington that
same weekend and discussed the Bush tip that Maclean had received from a
senior Republican.

Though Maclean
wouldn’t divulge the name of his source, a personal calendar kept by
Reagan’s foreign policy adviser, Richard Allen, (that I later gained
access to) showed that Allen had a meeting with Maclean earlier that
week.

Another document from
Allen’s personal files established that Allen and Bush were in contact
about the hostage issue. According to Allen’s handwritten notes, Bush
called him on Oct. 27, 1980, with news that former Texas Gov. John
Connolly had heard that Carter still might be able to spring the
hostages before the election.

Bush ordered Allen to
check out Connolly’s rumor and then pass his findings back to Bush via
former CIA officer Shackley, whose name was misspelled by Allen as “Shacklee.”

The note confirms two
points: that Bush was actively involved in the campaign’s October
Surprise operation and that Shackley, considered a master spy, was
helping Bush on the issue.

The existence of the
Republican-Iranian meetings in Paris also was confirmed by three senior
French intelligence officials, including French intelligence chief
Alexandre deMarenches, according to evidence uncovered by a later
congressional investigation.

David Andelman, a
journalist who was deMarenches’s biographer, testified to a House task
force that the French intelligence chief admitted setting up the Paris
meeting for Casey.

In January 1993,
another piece of corroborating evidence was sent to Congress by the
Russian Supreme Soviet, which pored through intelligence files in Moscow
at the request of the task force and reported finding documents showing
that Casey had traveled to Europe in 1980 for meetings with Iranians.

At the Paris meeting in
October 1980, “R[obert] Gates … and former CIA director George Bush
also took part,” said the Russian report, drafted by Sergei V.
Stepashin, who later became Russia’s prime minister.

Despite this body of
evidence, the Republican hierarchy has steadfastly rejected the October
Surprise charges. That denial was backed by a bipartisan House task
force that agreed in early 1993 that there was “no credible
evidence” to support the allegations of a Republican-Iranian deal.